Product Description

Near-death experiences? Past-life regression? Reincarnation? Are these sorts of things Jewish?

With a blend of candor, personal questioning, and sharp-eyed scholarship, Rabbi Elie Kaplan Spitz relates his own observations and the firsthand accounts shared with him by others, experiences that helped propel his journey from skeptic to believer that there is life after life.

From near-death experiences to reincarnation, past-life memory to the work of mediums, Rabbi Spitz explores what we are really able to know about the afterlife, and draws on Jewish texts to share that belief in these concepts--so often approached with reluctance--is in fact true to Jewish tradition.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #85832 in Books
• Published on: 2002-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Amazon.com Review
Does the Soul Survive?: A Jewish Journey to Belief in Afterlife, Past Lives & Living with Purpose by Rabbi Elie Kaplan Spitz combines journalistic reporting, scholarly biblical reading, and the probing self-examination of memoir in service of recounting his journey from skepticism to belief regarding life after death. Spitz, who teaches the philosophy of law at the University of Judaism, carefully describes traditional Jewish views of the afterlife and fearlessly explores the many challenges to those views arising in parapsychology--including near-death experiences, reincarnation, and spirit mediums. In the end, Spitz makes a cogent argument that belief in the afterlife is not, as has often been argued, incompatible with Jewish tradition. Wisely, he grounds his concluding arguments in the present-oriented ethic that guides Jewish devotion: "Our challenge is to use the time we have now to live gratefully and responsibly, knowing that how we choose to live shapes our soul," he argues. "The ability to accept death as part of life provides comfort and the awareness that each day is precious. Our challenge is to make the best of every day in this life." --Michael Joseph Gross

From Publishers Weekly
Spitz, a Conservative rabbi, sets out to convince readers that it's kosher to be Jewish and believe in reincarnation and the afterlife. He details his personal journey from skepticism to belief in the reality of the soul, distilling along the way the work of pioneering mediums like Brian Weiss and James van Draagh. Spitz discusses one seminar he attended in which he found himself revealing images of a previous life as a Native American, and another in which his wife's deceased grandparents "communicated" with her. Spitz employs an array of Jewish sourcesAparticularly mystical textsAthat affirm a faith in the survival of the soul, although the concept remains controversial in traditional Judaism. He claims that this faith can provide comfort to those struggling with death. "Letting go is easier when one believes death is not final," he says. He offers the personal example of coping with his mother's death, followed by dramatic instances of how he has used guided imagery to ease congregants into accepting death. While we are alive, our "homework assignment" is to nurture our souls through good deeds and to express gratitude to God, "rooting us more deeply in living this life each day as a precious gift." Spitz's compelling arguments may cement the beliefs of Jewish readers already receptive to the existence of the supernatural and open a doorway for doubters to reconceptualize life and death. (Oct.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Jewish tradition doesn't have much to say about the soul, and the concepts of near-death experiences and reincarnation are almost anathema. At least that's the tradition. Spitz, a rabbi, has another view. Drawing on personal experience and anecdotal evidence, he explains how he came, in his own life, to believe in soul survival. He also uses biblical and primarily kabbalistic sources to show that many of these concepts are found in Judaism. Spitz is a lively writer, and he brings new vigor to such long-debated topics as reincarnation. Whether he is chronicling his experiences with medium James Van Praagh, who spoke with the long-deceased family of Spitz's wife (with amazing accuracy), or making a serious exploration of the discrepancies in afterlife accounts, he easily holds readers' attention. Of special interest to Jewish audiences, naturally, but the scope and perspective will give this account much wider appeal. Ilene Cooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Authenticity and integrity
What Rabbi Spitz has done is to write a book in which he is not only our teacher and guide; he is also a friend and fellow traveler on the way. Moreover he has written from a place of authenticity and integrity in that the story he tells us is ultimately his story. Rabbi Spitz, a graduate of the Jewish Theological Seminary, is a lover of the Jewish people, a compassionate pastor and a dedicated teacher. Two forces moved him to re-explore issues of immortality, afterlife, and contact with the dead. The first was a meeting with non-Jewish sources that Elie understood as a calling to re-encounter Jewish texts, too. The second was a deep listening to the needs and stories of his congregants. Listening to their stories and hearing their needs, Rabbi Spitz is moved to engage a new Jewish theology not merely as an individual seeker but as the representative and leader of his community. Once he sets himself to his task Rabbi Spitz proceeds with grace, sensitivity, courage and scholarship. Since his goal is to address the intelligent skeptic and to effectively dent the dogmas of materialism that subtly under gird the world view of so many Westerners, he begins by sharing with his reader his own uncertainty, an act of courage to be sure. He then guides the reader through the meetings and encounters that opened his heart and mind to new possibilities and in doing so invites the reader to open along with him. Importantly he understands that without providing an intensive perusal of the relevant texts his guidance would be sensitive yet profoundly lacking. He thus proceeds to share with the reader much of the wisdom and nuance of the tradition as he unfolds key aspects of the Jewish and particularly Kabbalistic reality maps as they related to issues of afterlife, reincarnation and the like. Given the goals of the book and the personal spiritual odyssey that it unfolds for the reader I could not help but be disappointed and even saddened by an earlier, condescending Amazon review. Thankfully the reading public is more perceptive than the reviewer with an ax to grind. Indeed many thousands of seekers have found the wisdom and gentle guidance of Reb Elie's book to be both challenging and ultimately transformative. This reviewer can only conclude with two prayers. One, that we learn to engage in sacred conversation with passion and even sharp disagreement but without triumphalism and virulence. And that contemporary skeptic teachers like Reb Elie continue to serve as a model for the willingness to explore and redraw old reality maps, particularly when those maps no longer quench the deepest yearnings of the soul

Written with complete candor and impressive scholarship
In Does The Soul Survive?: A Jewish Journey To Belief In Afterlife, Past Lives & Living With Purpose, Rabbi Elie Spitz writes with complete candor and impressive scholarship about his belief in telepathy, near-death experiences, communications with those who have died, past life regression, and reincarnation as being within the scope and compass of Jewish tradition and teaching regarding the continuance of the soul beyond a physical death. Rabbie Spitz examines all the arguments, pro and con, regarding these issues from a thoroughly Judaic perspective. Enhanced for the reader with an appendix presenting a comprehensive view of what Torah and Jewish scholars throughout the ages have had to say regarding the immortality of the soul, Does The Soul Survive? is informative, challenging, at times controversial, but thought provoking and firmly grounded in Jewish scholarship.

Meaningful Book on the Subject of the Afterlife
It was early on a Sunday morning. My father was in Seattle, lying in a hospital bed, recovering from open-heart surgery. I was in Southern California, at the synagogue where I work, opening up the building for religious school. The sanctuary at our synagogue, when it is not being used for worship services, becomes a multipurpose room. A special family learning experience was scheduled to take place in it that morning for students and their parents.

As I opened the sanctuary doors, anger flowed through my veins when I saw that the room was not set up the way it needed to be. Did I forget to give the custodian directions on how the room needed to be set up? Or, did the custodian just mess up? I took off my jacket, loosened my tie, and began moving chairs and tables.

Sweat started dripping on my forehead. In the corner of the room, I saw my father sitting in a chair dressed in his pajamas, bathrobe, and slippers. I immediately walked over to him and engaged him in a conversation, which was really an argument. For some unknown reason, I did not inquire about his health but felt the need to talk with him at that particular moment about a painful childhood memory, a memory that I was surprised to remember.

A few hours later that same morning, as I walked into my office, the phone rang. It was the baby sitter who was with our children. She said she had an emergency message, that I needed to call my brother immediately. My brother was not home. His wife answered the phone. She gave me the message. My father died that morning.

When I tell people about the conversation I had with my father that morning, they respond in one of two ways. They think I was either hallucinating or that I actually encountered my father's soul. That week, my thoughts centered on my father's condition. The combination of mental exhaustion (from worrying about him,) physical tiredness (from being up early in the morning,) and anger (at the room not being set up correctly,) led my mind to imagine a mystical encounter.

On the other hand, there is an idea of Gehenna (Hebrew for "hell") in Jewish tradition. Unlike the Christian notion of eternal damnation, Gehenna is only a temporary state. At death, the soul departs from the body and goes to Gehenna, a process of purification where the individual confronts his or her sins and atones for them. After this real Yom Kippur, the soul then either returns from Gehenna to the world in another life (reincarnation) or goes to heaven to be with the Divine. Perhaps our encounter that morning had something to do with this mystery.

Since this experience, I have engaged in many conversations about the afterlife. I have become open, in these discussions, to the possible belief that our souls are eternal, that our souls existed in a previous life, and that our souls will be transferred into another life after we die.

Elie Spitz, the spiritual leader at Congregation B'nai Israel in Tustin, California in his new book Does the Soul Survivie? A Jewish Journey to Belief in Afterlife, Past Lives, and Living with Purpose agrees with this possibility. He recognizes, as a practicing pulpit rabbi, the potential comfort that belief in the afterlife and past lives can provide. He feels, in his heart and mind, that this belief is true.

Throughout the book, Spits searches Jewish tradition for evidence about the eternity of the soul. He interprets the possible existence of the soul's eternity in various Biblical texts and analyzes the type of afterlife and previous life existence of the soul that is presented in various rabbinic and other post-biblical literary sources. He also shares personal experiences that validate to him this existence.

To find evidence that a soul could have a previous life, Spitz meets with Dr. Brian Weiss, a Columbia University and Yale Medical School graduate who is chairman of the Psychiatry Department at Mount Sinai Hospital in Miami and author of the book, Many Lives, Many Masters. Weiss has become famous using therapeutic techniques of hypnosis to get individuals to speak foreign languages that they have never learned, to describe areas of the world that they have never visited, and to share personal accounts of previous time periods that historians later believe are authentic.

Weiss's evidence is not only documented in his research, but observed and experienced first hand by Spitz. Spitz, in recollecting about various life experiences and through hypnosis conducted on himself, comes to the belief that his own soul occupied a previous life. The detail in which he can describe that previous life, and how that previous life influences his existence today, is persuasive.

The evidence that Spitz shares about the afterlife is equally persuasive. In gathering this evidence, the author and his wife encounter James Van Praagh, a psychic and best selling author who's works as a medium communicating with the souls of the departed goes well beyond the realm of mere coincidence.

In the ending of the book, Spitz shares how his belief in the afterlife has benefited him as a pulpit rabbi. He shares a first hand account of how he was able to comfort, in a hospice situation, both a congregational member before she breathed her last breath and her loved ones who observed that last breath. Without a belief in life beyond this world, he would never have possessed the resources at that moment to console.

"Faith," Spitz writes, "in the survival of the soul might lead to magical thinking, the belief in an ability to defy reality and an unrealistic holding on to departed loved ones. But when responsibly approached, faith in the survival of the soul can also be an important source of affirmation and comfort. Like love, such faith is dangerous but no less real."

In Does the Soul Survive, Spitz does a masterful job demonstrating how this subject can be approached in a responsible manner and how affirmation and comfort can be extracted from that approach.

Elliot Fein teaches Jewish Religious Studies at the Tarbut V'Torah School in Irvine, California.